Demonstrating the Power of Signal Exploration/Conditioning for SCA

In this demonstration we show how important it is to select the correct signal processing techniques to maximize the signal quality of the side-channel signal measurements. We will show how you can identify the interesting frequency content and what the result is of isolating only the bands of interest. We will demonstrate this technique on a mobile phone, a complex system with a lot of noise. Without applying the correct filtering and other signal processing techniques, very little interesting information can be extracted, but once the interesting frequency bands are isolated, clear SPA leaks of the RSA implementation running on the phone’s CPU will become visible.